Between image and word, color and time: Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Series

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Jutta Lorensen

Jacob Lawrence canvasses tell pictorial stories, angular visions of fear and seeking and struggle and triumph.--Langston Hughes (qtd. in Spaulding 51)

"And the migrants kept coming. In 1941, Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series, a visual narrative about the Great Migration of African Americans from the agrarian South to the industrialized cities in the North of the US, opened to much acclaim in Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery in New York City. (1) It consists of 60 panels and a script of 60 short "captions" delineating this other tremendously significant yet often neglected American exodus story, which occurred in the wake of a virtually failed effort to "reconstruct" the American South after the Civil War. In Nicholas Lemann's estimation, the Great Migration has to be counted among "the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in history": between 1910 and 1970 approximately six and a half million African Americans left the South for a "Promised Land" of mainly large urban centers--Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, New York, Pittsburgh, among others--where they could escape from the vicious cycles of the southern share-cropping economy and the legal and social strictures of Jim Crow (6). (2) Lawrence's Migration Series remains one of the most powerful representations of this other journey to a much-fabled "America of opportunity and freedom"; a journey, however, that did not traverse the world's oceans, but instead the very landscape, real and symbolic, of the US itself. Yet, although the majority of the migrants were bound for the most populous urban centers of the US, they were admitted neither to the promises of America nor to the very core of its narrative: in the "country of immigrants," with all the laden connotations this label implies, the exodus from the economically destitute regions of the South was not granted arrival in many ways.

Lawrence was acutely aware of the complexities of the Great Migration, its social and political as well as cultural implications. Moreover, he was a painter who worked very consciously in the space of historical elision. (3) His work not only deals with the Great Migration, but also with such seminal figures as Harriet Tubman, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown. (4) It is therefore tempting to cast him as a "history painter." At first glance, the Migration Series, for which Lawrence uses both images and words to tell his story, seems to confirm this assessment, in particular because it is known that Lawrence spent much time in the 135th Street Branch of the Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture), where he studied African American history in preparation for the Migration Series. And yet he has always struggled to escape from this constraining title. This struggle to escape constraint is especially the case in the context of the Migration Series, which he views as steeped in the orally transmitted stories engulfing him in the Harlem of his youth: "I grew up hearing tales about people 'coming up,' another family arriving. People who'd been ... in the North for a few years, they would say another family 'came up' and they would help them to get established..." (qtd. in Gates, "New Negroes" 20). As Lawrence points out, "I was a youngster and I heard these stories over and over again..." (Gates, "New Negroes" 20). Even the library he frequented so assiduously was not only a haven of books, but a place replete with orally transmitted tales. For this reason, Lawrence himself describes it as a most stimulating institution: it became "alive for us. I would hear stories from librarians about various heroes and heroines" (Hills, "Prints" 43). He not only absorbed the themes of these ubiquitous accounts, however, but absorbed also the performative textual practices through which they were delivered. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the very structure of his Migration Series has been profoundly influenced by the narrative strategies of oral literature, whose hallmark is a dynamic textuality that comes into existence through a lively exchange between teller and listener. The Migration Series is not a series of "history paintings," then, but a textual performance brimming with personal stories about the momentous experience of migration; differently put, it is a text of remembrance. (5)

However, Lawrence himself did not participate in the Great Migration he reconstructs. His mother was a domestic worker from Virginia, his father a cook from South Carolina. They had met each other in Atlantic City, where Jacob Lawrence was born (Wheat 25; Hills, "Migration" 145). During his youth, he relocated a number of times with his family until they eventually settled in Harlem, the eponymous city for the famous "renaissance" in letters and arts that has come to be cherished as one of the most stellar achievements of the cultural exchange between the South and the North. In light of recent historical research ascertaining that the relocation from the South often was not executed all at once, but took place in installments (see, for example, Moore 107; Hine 131), this move could justifiably be viewed as an indication of Lawrence's own experiences as a migrant. Yet the crucial point for this inquiry is that Lawrence aims to represent the Great Migration from the narrations of others. This mediation is especially the case as regards his portrayal of the South. Lawrence did not grow up in the rural South and thus had no experience of the region that became such an important theme in the Migration Series; in fact, he only embarked on a journey there after the completion of this work, when he honeymooned in New Orleans with Gwendolyn Knight, whom he married in 1941 (Wheat 63). Nonetheless, Lawrence clearly links himself to the migrants and their memories through an astounding moment of simultaneous recognition and inspiration: "I was a youngster and I heard these stories over and over again.... I didn't realize that we were even a part of that.... I didn't realize what was happening until about the middle of the 1930s, and that's when the Migration Series began to take form in my mind" (Gates, "New Negroes" 20).